Your Body is Changing (5 page)

“That doesn’t sound politically correct,” said Mandy. “I guess that makes me all for it! That’s just the way I am. I hear that something is politically incorrect and I’m like, ‘I’m there!’”

“It’s a tradition,” said the little guy. “Not officially sanctioned but everybody knows about it. They turn a blind eye. It’s a lot of fun.”

“Well, I didn’t want to do it. And this guy Carl was trying to talk me into it by going, ‘You pussy, you pussy,’ and poking me in the chest. And he’s naked. And all the freshmen are running by naked. Carl steps out of the line just to poke me in the chest and harass me. So after a few minutes I head-butted him. I mean I head-butted him. I cracked his head wide open. Split his forehead like a melon. And Carl started crying. He’s a skinny little white punk with a nose stud and skin like a sick fish. He ran away naked, crying, with blood pouring down his face. And by now everybody else was gone, the trail was empty, and here’s Carl running naked by himself down the empty trail, crying and with a bleeding head, with his hands out in front of him kind of limp like this.”

“That’s quite a picture you put in my head,” said Mandy. “My goodness. I do declare.”

“Another time a guy tried to steal my backpack and I jumped up and down on his crotch.”

“Where are you from then?” said George, pouncing on Ray’s last syllable. He was the queasy type, Mr. Fielding observed. Mr. Fielding was hoping they would say something a little less off-color, something he could use in his humor column. And when his daughter arrived he could casually mention it to break the ice.

“You’re not from Atmore, so where are you from?” said George.

“Oh. Bayou Cottard,” said Ray.

“Oh my God. You must be the only good thing that ever came out of Bayou Cottard,” said Mandy.

“Are you from there too?” said Ray.

“Oh God no. No way. Bayou Cottard Day. Remember that?”

“It’s a joke we have in our family,” George said. “My father nearly sawed off his hand building a deck, so he had to go to the emergency room. And he said that it seemed like nearly everybody there was some redneck from Bayou Cottard who had had some kind of stupid redneck accident. He called it Bayou Cottard Day. We still say it all the time because it’s so hilarious. You know, when I’m down there for Christmas or whatever and we’re at the Target and there are a lot of rednecks around.”

“Bayou Cottard Day!” said Mandy.

“Who needs more grappa?” said the little grappa fiend. He filled the empty glasses.

“Well, anyway, you got the hell out,” said George. “That’s good. ‘Good on you!’ like they say in Australia. ‘Good on you, mate!’ Tim says you snap photos, right? I think that’s great. What of?”

“Poor people,” said Ray.

“That must be hilarious! We have to check it out. Hey, I know what you would like. You ever see that one part on Jay Leno? He gets these funny-looking goobers to show how dumb they are right there on national TV. Like he’ll ask some bucktoothed freak with his hair sticking up what’s the capital of something and they won’t even know what he’s talking about. Or he’ll show them a picture of a famous king and they’ll say, ‘Who’s that?’ It’s hilarious.”

“Isn’t that funny, I don’t even know what Jay Leno looks like,” said Mandy. “That’s just how little television I watch. Someone mentioned to me—it was probably you, George, don’t deny it!—that Jay Leno was retiring and I had to admit I couldn’t even picture the man, much less recall his particular accomplishment. Isn’t that just dreadful of me? People become intimidated when they realize that my opinions are so uninformed when it comes to television. I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I’ll even understand your photography. I’m afraid I won’t know the pop-culture references that you’re skewering.”

“I’m not skewering anything,” said Ray.

“Well, I’m afraid I just won’t get it. I don’t even know who Jay Leno is!”

“It has nothing to do with Jay Leno.”

“Is that his name? Is that how it’s pronounced? Who is he? Seriously, somebody tell me. No, no, I changed my mind, I don’t want to know. I’ll remain ignorant, thank you very much! If that’s what passes for ignorance in this misbegotten nation then sign me up.”

“It’s like me drinking grappa,” said the little one. “You ought to see the looks I get from waiters! Grappa is no longer trendy. So what? I happen to like grappa. These waiters can’t believe their eyes. Who does this guy think he is, ordering grappa? It should be served freezing cold. My Italian told me. But they won’t do it. We should get another bottle.”

“Yes, it’s exactly like that!” said Mandy. “People can’t believe it when I say I refuse to sell my art in a gallery. I’m just not interested in that world. Really I don’t understand that impulse at all. I mean, why would you want to put what you do on display?”

“So people can look at it,” said Ray.

“You see, that just doesn’t interest me at all. People can’t believe it when I say that. You probably think I’m a horrible person, putting down your way of life right to your face. I won’t apologize, though, no matter how hard you beg me.”

“It’s true, she won’t,” said George. “All she can do is call you on your shit. It’s in her nature.”

“What’s your medium?” Ray asked Mandy.

“I don’t have a medium.”

“I mean, do you paint, or…?”

“I know what you mean,” said Mandy. “I know what a medium is. I’m not some redneck. If you’d let me explain…Art can be the way I sit, the way I talk, the way I comb my hair…The only reason I would do art is to destroy it from the inside. Otherwise I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle. Paying an agent ten percent, for what? Dealing with people trying to change who I am. I refuse. I simply refuse. Am I blowing your mind? I also don’t like people named Joan or Joanne or any song with the word ‘ghost’ in it. I’m sorry if that freaks you out, but I just have to be honest. That’s what people can’t handle.”

The waiter brought over another bottle of grappa and some fresh glasses.

“So, Ray, what’s your fascination with the po’ folks? Is it that Bayou Cottard connection?” said George. “I would think you’d want to avoid them, if anything. Hey, does anybody want to pay money for a picture of poor people? Where’re they going to hang it? Over their dining room table so they can contemplate on it while they eat?”

“I would feel so depressed,” said Mandy.

“It’s not only poor people,” said Ray. “Maybe that was a bad description.”

“My father was an emergency room doctor,” said Mandy. “Not the same emergency room that George’s father went to, of course. This was back in Louisiana when I was ten years old. But it’s the same white-trash factor. My father was a brilliant emergency room doctor and he got so tired of helping these rednecks. Do you know that not one redneck whose head he stitched up ever thanked him? Not one.”

“Tell him about the gas pump,” said George.

“What about a gas pump?” said Ray.

“You know what my father saw this one redneck doing at a gas pump?”

“Smoking a cigarette?” said Ray.

“How did you know?”

“I don’t know, I just guessed. Something about the way you said it.”

“Well, that’s right. There was this redneck smoking a cigarette at a gas pump and my father went ballistic on his ass. ‘Listen here, you stupid redneck…’ You know. That redneck couldn’t believe that somebody was calling him on his shit. He just stood there with his cigarette hanging out of his stupid mouth.”

The Indian murmured.

“Did you say something?” asked his friend.

“Huh?”

“I thought you said something.”

“Yes, let’s hear from the artist,” said Mandy.

“By all means,” said George.

“I was a bully all the way from fourth grade to about tenth grade,” said Ray. “Eleventh and twelfth too, but I was starting to get a handle on it. Every time I beat somebody up I’d cry about it later. Looking back, I feel worse about the mental abuse I laid on people than the beatings I handed out. I have to say, though, it’s a great feeling when you get to that point of no return. When you get to that point of, ‘I am going to hurt you now, and hurt you bad, and that’s all there is to it and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.’”

“How violent,” said Mandy.

“I remember being at Gulf Shores when I was twelve, when my stepbrother tried to turn the truck around and got it stuck in a stranger’s yard. Yard was nothing but beach sand. You can really get stuck.

“I looked up to my stepbrother. He was a lot older than me. Man, he was tough. Navy Seal. He tried to explain how to help get the truck unstuck but I couldn’t do anything right and he was getting pissed. Then two Yankees with red faces and white hair and these weird bluish legs came out of the house and asked what the trouble was.

“One of them told us it was just like pulling a truck out of the snow, hadn’t we ever pulled a truck out of the snow? My stepbrother said he had never pulled a truck out of the snow.

“Well, that really set them off. These Yankees seemed to get some good fun out of the fact that we had never pulled a truck out of the snow. They couldn’t believe there was a grown man who had never pulled a truck out of the snow.”

“I always think it’s hilarious when Southerners complain about an inch of snow,” said the Indian’s small friend. “They should try living in New York for a day!”

“Now it’s funny you should say that,” Ray said. “That’s just the tack these Yankees took. One of the Yankees had been in Mobile during a little snowfall. He told us how the city of Mobile had shut down completely in a state of panic, and the snow wasn’t even sticking to the ground.”

“That’s just how it was down there!” said the little one, laughing.

“Yes,” said Ray, “the Yankee had it all down pat, all right. The way people raided grocery stores for supplies, how the City of Mobile got the snowplows out…Then he described his own more rational reaction to the snow, which had been to conspicuously ignore it.”

“That’s hilarious!” said George. “I bet those rednecks were like, ‘Do what?’ Like, ‘What’s this white shit, Bubba?’”

“Bayou Cottard Day!” said Mandy.

“The main Yankee, as I recall, expressed alarm at the way Mobilians began donning overcoats and woolen caps whenever the weather hit forty degrees. He said that he prided himself on marching up and down the sidewalk in shorts and sandals at such a time, and then when someone asked him wasn’t he cold he would say, ‘This is nothing!’ and everyone would be thrilled and amazed at his high level of comfort. Then he described some snow that had come up past the windows of his house in Wisconsin and had also smothered a cow.”

“Now that’s snow,” said George. “What you get in Alabama is not snow. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not snow.”

“Bayou Cottard Day!”

“One of the Yankees got a large rope and told me to tie it under the truck. I crawled under the truck. I didn’t know where to tie the damn rope. I didn’t know how to make a decent knot, even. One of the Yankees scooted in to the rescue and started showing me how to tie it. He was smiling like I was a retarded child, you know, very nicely.

“Finally they got the truck out—my stepbrother and I ended up not doing anything, they really did all of the work—and they stood in the sand waving goodbye and my stepbrother told me to roll down my window. He leaned across me and yelled at ’em like, ‘I’d like to see you in an asphalt parking lot in Mobile when it’s a hundred degrees and a hundred percent humidity! I’d be saying what’s the matter? Why are you laying on the ground with a stroke? Ain’t you ever been in a hundred percent humidity before? Wouldn’t that be funny?’

“One of the Yankees said, ‘You’re welcome,’ you know, real dry. My stepbrother got out of the truck and tried to beat their heads in with a tripod. Did I mention he was a photographer? Yeah, he was my inspiration in that matter. He never got to do anything with it because he went to prison. I’ve always felt like I was kind of taking up the slack for him. He sacrificed a lot for me. Hell, this is his peacoat. That’s why I never take it off. I feel like I been spending my whole life trying to grow into it.”

“You said you got it at a yard sale,” said the little man.

“I said a thrift store. I lied. I don’t like talking about my stepbrother.”

“Is he still in prison?” said Mandy.

“He died in prison,” said Ray. “Stabbed through the heart.”

“Oh my God. What was he there for?”

“Killing those Yankees,” said Ray. “He only killed one. But he pleaded guilty to both.”

“Why?” said Mandy.

“Because I killed the other one,” said Ray.

Mandy made a small burping sound, like some grappa had come up from her stomach and she had swallowed it again.

“I was trying to help him. He chased them up these tall rickety steps into their beach house, you know, the house was up on stilts because of hurricanes and high tides and floods. By the time I got the nerve to climb on up and peep inside, one of the Yankees was laying on the floor and my stepbrother had the other one flung over the arm of a couch, garroting him with fishing line. I found out later it was fishing line. He really should have used the rope from the truck.”

“Oh my Jesus Christ,” said George.

“But that rope was kind of thick. My stepbrother was a Navy Seal, you know. The white United States government taught him all these techniques. He was trained to kill without thinking twice about it. He’s finishing off the one Yankee and the other Yankee starts coming to. On the floor with this brown blood all around his head, that’s what I thought at the time, that it looked brown, I thought, ‘White people have brown blood, huh.’ And there was, there was a yellow rag, a plain yellow washrag on an end table, next to a spray can of Lemon Pledge, and I don’t know, I grabbed that rag and shoved it in the Yankee’s mouth to keep him from making noise. And I pinched his nose shut like this.”

Ray made a feeble grab at his friend’s nose. His friend jerked back in his chair.

“I should have eaten something today,” said Mandy. “I…” She stood swiftly, knocking over her chair, and fell forward. She braced herself with her palms against the table.

“No, wait, don’t go,” said Ray. “I have something I want to show you. Something I’m never without.”